FILM
Here Is Tokyo!
/ Jason Jude Chan
03.06.09
1: Anonymity
Based on Gabrielle Bell’s Cecil and Jordan in New York comic, the cleverly-titled “Interior Design” features Gondry’s patented adolescent-adults; in this case, go-with-the-flow Hiroko (Ayako Fujitani) and her would-be-Kurosawa beau, Akira (Ryo Kase). The two also happen to be the archetypical, hopeful, just-arrived couple that struggles to make an inch of headway in the big, soul-usurping city. As he awaits the debut of his hilariously incongruous sci-fi film, Akira ambitiously labors as a boutique gift-wrapper (you get the sense that he’s Gondry’s japonais-version of Stéphane Miroux, with the same insistent need to frame the real through reel imagination and the habit of parrying serious issues with charming asides); Hiroko, on the flipside, flounders in her search for viable lodging and employment, the pressure compounded by the fact that Hiroko’s friend houses the two at her fit-for-one apartment. Once Akira’s fantastical film screens to polite, halfhearted applause, though, Hiroko’s aimless lifestyle undergoes an absurd, Kafkaesque transmutation: her feelings have manifested themselves in a strange new way. With this, Gondry characteristically skirts the bleak reality with whimsical fantasy, yet he’s still able to beautifully—if bizarrely—capture the arbitrary value of human utility in any megacity’s crippling anonymity. Gondry appropriately frames the couple as the space cadets that they role-play, shuffled across Tokyo’s sprawl without any sense of assimilation.
Even in Japanese, Gondry’s dialogue lacks the twang of real-life. Its wearying effect is intermittently mitigated with wry phrases like “I’ve seen smoke inside a film, but never outside!” which a spectator enthuses about Akira’s ingenious debut gimmick of a smoke machine. But the visual presentation is typically majestic, from the initial shots of Tokyo glowing through a rain-smudged window to a variegated sea of towed vehicles; Gondry, who previously captured the city’s unearthly pace and person-abuts-person mash in a feverish Polaroid commercial, again justifies his numinous esteem by translating Tokyo’s suffocating claustrophobia and its overwhelming scale with relative ease—even if his narrative accents are slightly off.
Based on Gabrielle Bell’s Cecil and Jordan in New York comic, the cleverly-titled “Interior Design” features Gondry’s patented adolescent-adults; in this case, go-with-the-flow Hiroko (Ayako Fujitani) and her would-be-Kurosawa beau, Akira (Ryo Kase). The two also happen to be the archetypical, hopeful, just-arrived couple that struggles to make an inch of headway in the big, soul-usurping city. As he awaits the debut of his hilariously incongruous sci-fi film, Akira ambitiously labors as a boutique gift-wrapper (you get the sense that he’s Gondry’s japonais-version of Stéphane Miroux, with the same insistent need to frame the real through reel imagination and the habit of parrying serious issues with charming asides); Hiroko, on the flipside, flounders in her search for viable lodging and employment, the pressure compounded by the fact that Hiroko’s friend houses the two at her fit-for-one apartment. Once Akira’s fantastical film screens to polite, halfhearted applause, though, Hiroko’s aimless lifestyle undergoes an absurd, Kafkaesque transmutation: her feelings have manifested themselves in a strange new way. With this, Gondry characteristically skirts the bleak reality with whimsical fantasy, yet he’s still able to beautifully—if bizarrely—capture the arbitrary value of human utility in any megacity’s crippling anonymity. Gondry appropriately frames the couple as the space cadets that they role-play, shuffled across Tokyo’s sprawl without any sense of assimilation.
Even in Japanese, Gondry’s dialogue lacks the twang of real-life. Its wearying effect is intermittently mitigated with wry phrases like “I’ve seen smoke inside a film, but never outside!” which a spectator enthuses about Akira’s ingenious debut gimmick of a smoke machine. But the visual presentation is typically majestic, from the initial shots of Tokyo glowing through a rain-smudged window to a variegated sea of towed vehicles; Gondry, who previously captured the city’s unearthly pace and person-abuts-person mash in a feverish Polaroid commercial, again justifies his numinous esteem by translating Tokyo’s suffocating claustrophobia and its overwhelming scale with relative ease—even if his narrative accents are slightly off.